Understanding Shopping Carts

1. Customers view your online catalogue
2. Customers add items to a shopping cart
3. Customer proceeds to check out
4. System calculates freight and sales tax and discounts if any and determines a final price
5. Customer may enter vouchers or promo codes to reduce the final price
6. Customer enters their delivery details and any customised checkout questions
7. Customer selects method of payment, then pays through a payment gateway (if applicable) 
8. Merchant receives an order notification and payment receipt by email
9. Merchant sends the goods with a shipping docket
10. Merchant can view sales reports

How to create a new shopping cart (summary for merchants)

1. Add a shopping cart page to your Web Widgets website.
2. If you have more than 20 products, you should create some categories.
3. Add all your products to the catalogue, with descriptions, photos and prices.
4. Define shipping and freight calculations.
5. Define currencies and sales tax rates.
6. Define payment options for the customer, eg credit card, online banking, cheque or pickup even. 

Payment Options - You provide the options for how your customers pay online.

• Credit Card - A compatible payment gateway is required for credit card payments. Alternatively, we provide an industry standard secure form if you are able to process credit cards offline.
• Online Banking - Links to banks with your account number and a reference ID enable the customer to pay by "ANZ pay anyone", "ASB fast cheque" or other methods of online banking payments.
• Paypal / Paymate - These type of prepaid accounts can also be used by your customers to pay you.
• Vouchers - You can issue fixed value vouchers with expiry dates that can be used to discount a purchase or pay it completely.
• Cheque - A postal address and reference number is provided to the customer so that they may send a cheque by post.
• Enquiry/Invoice - The customer is posting the order as an enquiry only, and will probably require further communication before the sale is completed.
• Customer Code - If you are in business to business sales, your customers may have an account code they can use.
• You can show or hide any of these payment methods.

Catalogue / Shopping Cart Layout Customisations

• “Custom gallery” layout versus "list layout with summary text and price", plus many more layouts to choose from.
• All products can have a photo, title, description, code, link, dual price, dual currency, purchase options and classifications.
• Plus each product can have upto 3 additional text fields, like Brand, Model, Supplier Code.
• Products can have colour swatches or dropdown, size dropdown and a third custom style/option dropdown. These options affect pricing/stock.
• Products can have unlimited additional customisation options, checkboxes, text inputs, etc that don't affect price/stock. 
• Products can have small gallery view (multiple product shots)
• Categories can be by photo or have associated text and product index introductions.
• Each product can exist in several categories.
• Categories are multi-leveled, so you can organise your products for optimum navigation ability.
• Long lists of products are broken into pages with direct page number acess and next/previous page links.
• Product search by keywords, codes and category.
• Price has multiple formats, simple sales tax inclusive price, excl/incl price, domestic/export prices, RRP discounted.
• Quantity in stock can be displayed in multiple formats or none, or be used to automatically hide products. 
• Products can be prioritised or hidden or made unavailable for purchase.
• Products in each section can be ordered by most cheapest/expensive price, title, code, random, historical, chronological order.
• Popular or similar products can be suggested during shopping process.
• Options to re-label or add graphical elements to the shopping process.

Trade Pricing / Group Member Pricing

• Trade pricing can be hidden behind a customer login
• Each product can have up to eight associated trade prices, in addition to a retail price.
• Authorised customers can be assigned to a price group.
• Authorised customers are automatically shown their discounted price when they login.
• You only need to manage one catalogue.

Bulk Purchasing

• Options for discounted pricing for Bulk Purchasing of products

Stock Levels

• Our catalogue manager can maintain your stock levels, displaying out of stock messages once sold out.
• Maintain supplier information and codes against your inventory
• Display graphs indicating approximate stock levels, without indicating actual numbers of stock you maintain.
• Customisable reorder level points for inclusion of stock items in the out of stock reports.

Checkout Customisations / Gift Cards

• Customised instructional text can be inserted in several places in the checkout process and thankyou screens
• You can insert unlimited additional fields into the checkout process.. eg Gift cards, special delivery address, gift recipient name, etc
• Additional fields will be automatically appended to the order notes field and stored in the database, and displayed in any reprints of the order.
• Orders or Tax invoices can be generated at the checkout.
• You choose which payment options the customer can select.
• Optional voucher redemption can happen at the checkout process.. Vouchers cope with part cash payment and multiple voucher entry
• Sales tax is calculated automatically if you have entered tax rates, and is displayed clearly in the orders/invoices.

Freight and Shipping Calculation Options

• Unlimited freight destination options (eg Across town, inter-island, by country, choice of courier)
• Different fees per product type per unit
• Base fee per order
• Minimum fee per order
• Maximum fee per order
• Fee per unit
• Fee by weight (weight must be entered for all relevant product items)
• Fee by percentage of order value

Accounting integration options and EDI

• Invoices can be automatically posted to www.xero.com online accounting system
• You can upload your product information in bulk from your MYOB, or Excel
• You can update product prices and quantities from MYOB or Excel
• You can download your products into Excel and the upload/update by code if you want to make lots of changes in bulk
• You can download your orders in bulk into a CSV or Excel format.
• Download data can be searched by date, and unposted orders are also searchable.
• We now have a range of API features for you to integrate to other accounting packages
• Point of Sale can be synced via VendHQ for complete control over Online and Retail sales.

What is a payment gateway?

Our shopping cart integrates with several payment gateways. A payment gateway is required to collect the money from the customers credit card, and deposit the money into your bank account. A payment gateway is typically a bank, or a company that specialises in payment gateway solutions. Web Widgets, like all web hosting providers, is not a bank, and does not provide these financial services. However, we integrate to the most popular payment gateways around. Please read on to learn more about catalogues, shopping carts and payment gateways.  

View compatible payment gateways here.

 How a customer uses the shopping cart

1. Depending on your shopping cart, the customer may click a product classification link first.
2. The customer may search or browse your products
3. Click on a product title for more information
4. Click on the "buy" button to add this product to your shopping cart
5. Change the quantity and press "click update".
6. Continue shopping or...
7. Enter a destination shipping address
8. Tax and shipping charges are automatically calculated
9. Enter remaining order details and payment method
10. An order will be emailed to the merchant
11. If the customer chose "credit card", then a secure form will appear to collect credit card details.
12. If the merchant is a World Pay customer, then the payment will be cleared immediately and both the merchant and customer will also receive a receipt email.
13. If other payment gateways/methods are used, then the merchant needs to manually check for receipt of payment before shipping goods.

How the customer pays for their order

We provide several order and payment methods, and ensure you get details of the order and customer, irrespective of a successful payment. Click here to review payment gateways in more details

How much does the Shopping Cart Software cost?

You pay us nothing extra for our shopping cart software, its free!!!  Shopping carts are included for free in most of our hosting plans. There are special no costs from our perspective for providing you with a shopping cart. There is no setup fee and there is no additional hosting fee. Please note however that the hosting plan is dependent on how many products you have. If you require training, then additional fees apply for that.

However, your chosen bank and/or payment gateway may charge you a setup fee and/or monthly/annual fee and/or transaction fee and/or remittance fee. Expect to pay about $200 to setup in your first year, then ongoing fees of 5% of transaction value and about $40 per month. These fees will be payable to your bank and/or payment gateway.

Note: You cannot use our shopping cart software on your own server. It is not for sale. You can continue to host your website elsewhere and link to our shopping cart, but sorry, there is no financial saving to do so.